


Red

by Schwoozie



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Backstory, F/M, Falling In Love, Hair, Intimacy, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-11
Updated: 2012-08-11
Packaged: 2017-11-11 21:29:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/483075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schwoozie/pseuds/Schwoozie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her highest gesture of trust is sealed in a bottle of Red #7.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red

**Author's Note:**

> Day 6 of 30 Days of Writing challenge
> 
> prompt: flame

It seems appropriate that the first time he touches the nape of her neck was also the subject of their first cordial conversation.

“Why do you dye it that color?” he asks, shouting to be heard over the roar of the troop transport. It is before Banner has his meltdown, when the world is a little less strange, and SHEILD doesn’t have the funding yet for ground-to-sea-to-air vehicles.

After hours of wheedling and threatening and following her from corner to corner of a seedy Hungarian hotel room, he finally convinced her to give the old client the slip. He doesn’t know exactly what seals it - the protection, the stability, or just his dashing good looks (in the years to come he wonders about the last one - when her eyes linger too long on his mouth and hands, when she insists on attending to his wounds herself - although that might just be Tasha, the way it is Tasha to claim the first shower and hum in the car and chew on strands of her red red hair when she thinks he isn’t looking, because if she has a tell this is it and he wonders if anyone has figured it out before, or if it’s just him the way it’s just him holding the hair off the nape of her neck) - but after hours of expending his inferior bag of wits, he has convinced her to run and the first thing he asks is about her hair.

“I like red,” she answers.

“But it’s identifiable. I could have asked a hundred people, and they all could have given me the girl with the red hair.”

“It shows I’m not afraid.”

He snorts. “I don’t need your hair to tell me  _that_.”

But sometimes, he wonders if he does. What he tells her many times after is always true - she’s a spy, not a soldier, and sometimes a spy’s greatest asset is her fear. He wonders what kind of man he’d be if he didn’t forgo the emotion all together. If he were more afraid, maybe he wouldn’t need a bow and several hundred yards to separate him from his target. Maybe he could take her in his arms and look her in the eyes when she shakes so hard she can barely speak. Maybe he’d understand her need to be closer in the dark, to wrap herself around him and cling through the night but always be gone with the sun. He always thought empathy was the death of a good soldier, but the thing with Tasha - she makes him want to be a little bit bad.

If he can’t look in her eyes, he can sooth with his hands, and so he does, threading his fingers through her darkening roots, working the cream into her scalp. She hums quietly as he works, bent in two over the sink in a way that should make him uncomfortable but really is a balm, relaxing to see that she is relaxed, that she trusts him enough to bare the all-too-human ridges of her spine. She tells him afterwards, in a way that is shy the way a honey badger is shy, that she likes the squareness of his palms, the rough ridges of his fingers - it is in no way a sexual remark, even from a woman who broadcasts sex through her every pore - she says it almost in wonderment, as if she had never thought of him, or thought of hands, as objects to be admired.

She vanishes with her toothbrush without another word, and he holds his hands to the light. The dye has turned his cuticles vermillion, and in that halo of light he could imagine his skin aflame.

He is disrobed and in bed by the time she returns, shuts the light and turns her back. But he cannot help in the middle of the night drifting his hand across the strands on her pillow.

The tingling in his palms is something not far, at last, from fear.


End file.
